Lucia Coppolaro and Francine McKenzie
Editors of A Global History of Trade and Conflict Since 1500 (Palgrave, 2013)
In the early 17th century, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the Dutch East India Company’s governor-general in the Indies, explained that trade and war were inseparably linked: ‘we cannot make war without trade nor trade without war’.[1] The utility of war and other violent methods to secure an advantageous commercial position was an extreme view even by the mercantilist standards of the day, but trade and conflict were commonly connected. About one hundred years later, Montesquieu, the Enlightenment political philosopher, reached the radically different conclusion that trade was an instrument of peace; thus in 1748, he wrote ‘Peace is the natural effect of trade’. Continue reading “Does Trade Promote Peace? An Historical and Global Perspective”
Imperial & Global Forum 
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